The Weird But True Stories Behind the 50 Craziest Laws In the United States

The criminal justice experts over at Olivet Nazarene University recently rounded up the 50 strangest laws on the books in America. The peculiar laws covered everything from elephants tied to parking meters to wearing a fake mustache in church. Many of the crazy-sounding laws, if not all of them, will leave you wondering why they exist and who thought of them in the first place.

It turns out, researchers at the university were thinking the same thing, so they decided to do some digging into how these laws came about. And lucky for us, they compiled their revealing findings into a handy infographic.

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The illustration below re-lists all the crazy laws, and pairs them with their origin stories. (It also let us know if additional information on a law wasn't traceable.)

Rumors of new crazy laws are also introduced, like how Idaho residents are prohibited from giving someone a 50-pound box of chocolates. Many of the odd laws' origins stem from outdated practices (Connecticut's law of a pickle having to bounce in order to be considered a pickle stemmed from men selling cucumbers as pickles in the 1800s) to tales of the state's history (Washington's law against harassing Bigfoot or Sasquatch originated when the speculation of the existence Bigfoot reached its height in 1969).

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See the image below to get the background on the rest of the country's craziest laws.